Navigating Futures: arts education as a route to youth empowerment and pedagogical innovation

This project seeks to enhance engagement with, and impacts from, research and resources produced from a previous project funded under the Global Challenges Research Fund (entitled 'From displacement to development: arts education as a means to build cultural resilience and community-led arts production in the Marshall Islands). It responds to particular development challenges in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) concerning the education, self-expression and wellbeing of young people. The RMI has the second youngest population in the Pacific, with 40% of the population under 16 years of age, but in spite of having one of the highest levels of per capita spending on education in the region, school dropout rates, and youth unemployment and suicide rates, are high. Our project responds to current government policy on improving student participation and attainment in education through developing more culturally relevant teaching resources, improving literacy in both English and Marshallese, and making better use of Information Technology for innovative teaching (PSS annual report 2016-17). It also responds to national and regional Pacific policies on young people, by seeking to engage and empower marginalised young people, particularly those in urban settings (SPC Pacific Youth Development Framework 2014-23; RMI National Strategic Plan, 2015-17). Further, it addresses several of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals focused around education, equality, and fostering partnerships for development.

The project will involve:

(1) A series of workshops with schoolteachers in four RMI elementary, middle and high schools during April/May 2019, with a further four workshops undertaken in June/July 2019. These will involve upskilling teachers in innovative pedagogical approaches to improving children's literacy and skills in artistic expression and interpretation, using a set of culturally relevant creative works, and accompanying teaching resource packs, produced from the project team's previous GCRF project. The project team will use feedback from participating teachers, and advice from our project partner Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) and the Curriculum Division of the RMI Ministry of Education, to align the teaching resource packs more closely with the RMI National Curriculum (completing revisions by October 2019, and undertaking further trials from November 2019-January 2020).

(2) A series of workshops (also undertaken during April/May 2019) focused around creating animations, film-making, and implementing traditional navigational knowledge, to be attended by young Marshall Islanders, including those who have dropped out of the formal education system and/or are unemployed. These workshops have been requested by project partner Jambo Arts (a youth NGO) and various other RMI stakeholders, and will result in an animation of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's poem 'History Project' and various short films and reflective pieces by youth participants that will be uploaded to NGO websites (by October 2019), entered for competitions (such as the RMI film competition and AHRC Research in Film Awards) and further promoted by the project team via our website (map.llc.ed.ac.uk, to be launched August 2018) and social media, during the final stages of the project (and post-award).

These activities bring potential benefits that resonate not just with RMI youth policy, but also with wider national sustainable development goals, outlined in the RMI National Strategic Plan (2017), focused around (a) creating an innovative population by improving education access and opportunities, and (b) mobilising local and traditional knowledge to address emerging challenges facing people communities and governments. Our project will empower teachers and young people to use arts education not only to develop literacy and technical skills, but also to enlist traditional cultural knowledge to address current development challenges.

Who might benefit:

1) The Marshallese education sector
2) Marshallese NGOs
3) Marshallese youth
4) International/other beneficiaries

How they might benefit:

1) We learned from our previous GCRF project that RMI schoolteachers are eager to use the culturally-relevant, bilingual creative works that emerged from our activities, and that they wanted accompanying teaching toolkits from us. Our planned follow-on project will address this by training teachers from a range of RMI schools in the use of our resources in classrooms, during a series of workshops designed to upskill them in international pedagogy and practice relating to arts education and visual literacy, as well as ensuring they resonate with local knowledge/values. This also potentially benefits the RMI Ministry of Education, in that our outputs are already attuned to educational policy surrounding raising literacy levels; introducing more culturally relevant and bilingual teaching materials; and using innovative pedagogies and technologies to increase student engagement/attainment. Following the workshops and further trials of our resources, our team will work with the MoE Curriculum Division and project partner Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) to revise the teaching packs (in light of teacher feedback), aligning them even more closely to teacher needs and MoE agendas. We will target each resource to specific age groups depending on content, across all curriculum levels.

2) During the 'Forced Displacement' fieldwork, the project team worked/met with a number of RMI NGOs supporting/training young people in the arts/traditional crafts. These organisations are run by enthusiastic volunteers who have recruited many young people, but lack the funding/infrastructure to undertake more adventurous creative activities. In particular, project partner Jambo Arts said they wished to expand the range of activities/skills they could offer young people beyond painting/drawing to animation and film-making, which would not only empower young people to express themselves in new formats, but also create transferable skills that could create jobs for young people. To fulfil the requests made of the project team by Jambo Arts/other NGOs, we are now poised to facilitate these workshops with AHRC support.

3) A high proportion of young Marshall Islanders drop out of school due to disillusionment with the formal education system. Many of these young people have been recruited to arts and traditional craft NGOs who have offered them training in the arts, canoe-building and other creative skills that have enabled these young people to gain employment. At the invitation of project partner Jambo Arts (and other RMI NGOs), we have planned a series of youth arts workshops for 2019; these are designed to widen the creative skillsets of these young people to enable them to become economically self-sufficient, or undertake further training, within and beyond the Marshall Islands in new areas such as animation/graphic design and film-making. To help embed and sustain these activities, we are also establishing a mentoring scheme between project artists and youth participants, and leaving 10 iPads for future training/use.

4) We will reach a wider (inter)national field of beneficiaries, and seek to build future collaborations/partnerships, through social media (particular facebook and twitter); websites hosted by the project, stakeholders and partners (such as PREL, Jambo Arts, Okeanos RMI, and REACH-MI); presentations at conferences attended by stakeholders and policymakers (including the Micronesian Youth Summit and the conference of the Social Development Programme at the Pacific Community [SPC]); and international NGO networks (UNESCO, UNICEF, IoM) to promote the work of our project/stakeholders and forge new routes to impact for our project. The PI will track both teacher and online user responses to our materials using questionnaires and web analytics.